Angus Beath's Blog - a jotting down of thoughts, handy to remember things and general BS about the world.

Friday, 4 January 2013

Lenovo L430 Review

Recently to replace my HP6560b notebook, I purchased a Lenovo L430. It looks like this:

Lenovo L430 Notebook

and it's specifications are:

14" AntiGlare LCD monitor

i5-2520M Processor,

4GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM (upgraded to 8GB),

320/7200 HDD,

Multi-Burner,

HD Graphics 3000,

Bluetooth,

Fingerprint reader,

720p Camera,

ABGN Wireless,

WWAN,

Card Reader,

Windows 7Professional 64,

6 Cell battery (max 7.5 hours run time),

1 Year return to depot warranty

GPS

It has the same sturdy feel and build that all Lenovo notebooks do, a legacy of the IBM heritage Lenovo has successfully perpetuated. I'm absolutely delighted by the keyboard on this device - it is the best notebook keyboard I have ever used. I'm comparing it to the following notebooks: HP 6560b, HP tc4400, Lenovo R500, MacBook Air, various ASUS laptops, various Toshiba laptops, Lenovo X1 and HP 6730b. Obviously I get around on the notebook scene :-)

The touchpad and other pointing device are efficient and work well. I was surprised and impressed also by the efficacy of the wireless - it has been more efficient and connects at higher speed than my other notebooks, including the HP6560b. The built in GPS is pretty neat too - although I'm not sure what the hell I'm going to do with it :-) Generally I remove a lot of the pre-installed software, but I have of course left the Lenovo software, which is gradually improving all the time and it's usefulness is improving as well. I installed 1.6GB of updates in the first two hours of having this laptop which is indicative of Windows 7 out of the box. I had a spare 4GB of RAM laying around so I installed that for fun.

Overall I've found this notebook to be quite fast in general usage, quick to boot and efficient in it's power usage. I've used this notebook all day, and by the time I left the office still had 20% of battery available. This is doing web browsing, Excel, file moves etc. The L430 also has USB3 and an always on USB port I used to good example as I travelled between client offices today to charge my HTC One X. I'm looking forward to my docking station arriving so I can plug it into my dual 22" LED monitors. For about $1200 for the laptop and the docking station together these laptops are great value. I'm not sure how long they'll be around for - pretty they'll be discontinued soon in this trend of everything going to Windows 8. Grab one if you can :-)